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Please look at the "Historical" section. While some may interpret that quote as showing that there were some good orcs, i think that's stretching it a wee bit. furthermore, to really take that quote in that context implies that there were some dragons, trolls, spiders, and other things malformed by Melkor who fought for the Alliance against Sauron. interesting that tolkien never wrote anything of "Puff," the good dragon who helped Elendil and Gil-galad defeat Sauron.
Another way to look at the quote is that Tolkien didn't take Orcs or other evil things as fully sentient beings, and thus not a race. Why only with the influence and power of Melkor/Sauron could these evil things pose a significant threat (such as when the orcs fled after the 2nd fall of Sauron). True species would, in a theological sense, would be those that were created or permitted by Eru, Arda's God. Elves and Men are races because they are the children of God; Dwarves are also a races as they were adopted by God. So please remove that section before I do.

It seems whatever this was is gone, as searching the page for "historical" and "good" doesn't find a section suggested from the above. But in response to your "Orcs... thus not a race", I think Orcs are definitely a race: and the banner at the bottom of the page listing them as Evil Races seems to suggest the community agrees. They are a mutated form, distorted by Melkor, of the Elven Race. So either Orcs are a race themselves, or otherwise a subspecies of Elf (interesting), if one applies the way the real world classifies species. Echoniner (talk) 07:37, January 14, 2014 (UTC)

This article is a real mess, a jumbled collection of unsupported conjecture, supposition, theories, and rambling (and often redundant) musings by various contributors. Wikia ideally tries to live up to Wikipedia standards of encyclopedic content. Information in the article should be factual, that is, should be taken only from canonical sources, i.e., books and articles written by Tolkien, or from published sources, which should be well cited in the references. It should NOT be a page of dueling ideas where various readers argue their competing theories!

I've done what I could with the "Origins" section, which was perhaps the worst offender and more resembled a rambling, incoherent, high school essay than a proper Wikia entry. Much work remains to be done on the entire "Orcs" article.

This article hints at it, but says nothing about Orcs and daylight, that Sauron used dark clouds from Mordor for the Battle of Pelennor Field, and specifically what happens in daylight and what breeds can handle it. I'd like to see that stuff. Echoniner (talk) 19:02, January 12, 2014 (UTC)

"In Tolkien's Sindarin language, "Orc" is orch, plural yrch. In his late, post-Lord of the Rings writings (published in The Peoples of Middle-earth), he preferred the spelling "Ork", evidently mainly to avoid the form Orcish, which would benaturally pronounced with the c as /s/ instead of /k/."

Is this in-fiction? I don't think there's any language that naturally pronounces c as s - except in French, and it's not even a c, it's ç

I have some problems with this section. As I expected, it doubled in size when the "Battle of the Five Armies" came out. The spelling and grammar was horrible, all the paragraphs were way too short, and they were lazily quoted from other articles. I've tidied them up of course, but that isn't the problem. The problem is, they're all redundant. Gundabad Orcs, Moria Orcs, Mount Gram Orcs, Guldur Orcs, and Goblins are all the same thing, no matter what the movie says. Even the Orc Berserkers were merely enlarged goblins, or Hobgoblins (which for some reason were not included here), and Goblins were never once reffered to as Kobolds in any source material that I know of. Also, Isengard Orcs are Snagae.